Les Escargots – an animated short from 1965 was the perfect opener for…

Fantastic Planet – a classic French animation film from the mid-70’s, Fantastic Planet was introduced by Darren Aronofsky. This may be getting a US rerelease and you arthouse fans should make a point of catching it.

The Fountain – Darren Aronofsky’s — who brought us Pi and Requiem for a Dream brought us his latest and I’m glad I got to see what I consider my second Oscar-worthy film of the year. Nominations for Cinematography, Original Score and Original Screenplay.

Edmond – A cast of famous faces (William H. Macy, Julia Stiles, Joe Mantegna, Ling Bai, Denise Richards, Mena Suvari, Debi Mazar, George Wendt) brings us this adaptation of a Mamet play that — while excellently performed — comes off as a film adaptation of a stage play.

Maybe I’d be more supportive of my husband’s ukulele playing if it sounded like this. I love the version of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” so much that I’m actually thinking about buying his new album.

Is it bad when you learn “what’s‘up” with the kids these days from NPR (or in my case XMPR)? I heard this bit at the end of the show yesterday on Soundcheck about the hit song and dance craze this summer in Harlem. Included is a link to dances on YouTube.

The District – How do you get enough money to solve the conflicts in your ghetto between the gypsies and the gangbangers so you — a gypsy boy — can spend time with your gangbanger’s daughter girlfriend? Invent a time machine and bury some mammoths in the prehistoric past under your future district. The animation and music in this film are phenomenal but I was uncharacteristically annoyed at the many subtitles.

Jack Stevenson’s: Uncensored& – Jack Stevenson is an archivist and author who now lives in Denmark. He showed a few clips covering the depiction of sex in the film world that started in Sweden and Denmark and, of course, quickly made it to the States. I would attach a picture to this item, but this is a family show. If you have an interest you can read the book.

Your Name Here – The internet archive is one of the best things in this virtual world and I was especially glad to see Industrial Film Parody “Your Name Here” on the big screen before this night’s big event.

El Laberinto del Fauno – I refuse to call this stunning new offering from Guillermo del Toro by it’s pandering US release name. It’s marketed as a fantasy piece, but the core of this film is about post-war Spanish fascists trying to extract guerillas from rural mountains. The reality of his stepdaughter’s relationship with a fantasy world is only a part of this wonderful story that will surely get a foreign film Oscar nod.

I’m having a near-summer 04-level head implosion today reading about the Military Commissions Act which passed the House and is on its way to passing the Senate. (This is the one that lets George Bush define torture and interpret the Geneva Conventions so we can all be sure we’re still the good guys. It’s also going to let the people’s branch pretend like it’s still part of our government.)

Two quotes really crystallize my view of our two political parties:

The Listening Dead – this b&w short is filmed like a silent movie but the supporting music is just as riveting as the visuals.

Shinobi: Heart Under Blade – In the tradition of Crouching Tiger and House of Flying Daggers, this is another romantic fantasy wire-fu film based on the Romeo and Juliet concept. The son and daughter in line of succesion of opposing ninja factions meet in the woods and fall in love. The unifying emperor of Japan sets the factions against each other offering the winner the position of Shogun. This film is beautiful and the story intriguing — another sub-titled hit from the Orient.

Roman – Twice before I’ve seen Lucky McKee and Angela Bettis introduce a collaborative work but this time the roles are reversed with Lucky as actor and Angela as director (but still written by Lucky). The first third of Roman was filmed in 2004 before the actress who plays the primary victim was awarded the leading role in Veronica Mars, then Lucky and Angela got busy with other projects. They finished the film this year and it’s another indie/weirdo/horror success from the two, but it’s also another film with the ameteur look and feel from this talented pair who shun the system.

The Woods – a girl having problems at home is sent to a boarding school where things just don’t seem right. This film is great and could be screened alongside The Omen or The Shining. Instead of jumping into a gory fright fest like most current studio horror films, The Woods is about intrigue first and solid performances next. Lucky seemed bitter about the studio involvement in this picture, and I agree they are stupid to move this straight-to-DVD without a deserved theatrical release, but this film is the best thing he’s made — a classic quality terror movie.

Bug – based on a play by Tracy Letts with Ashley Judd, Harry Connick Jr. and featuring Michael Shannon who originated the role — and was in attendance for the screening. A woman whose husband just got out of prison is on the edge when she meets a man who says the Army experimented on him before he got away. Then things really unravel. This is definitely an arthouse film, but a good one. Fine performances from the entire cast and an excellent script.

The Host – Read all the way through this review. When I say “Korean Monster Movie” don’t dismiss this film like a man in a rubber costume. This is a thrilling sci-fi flick with a great family dynamic. This is one of the best films of the festival and well worth seeing.

RIP – hillarious still motion animation short about a dream and reality. good stuff.

Nightmare – a film-school director meets and bags a girl at a wrap party then wakes up the next morning to find a camera at the foot of the bed with a tape that shows he and his conquest pulling a Natural Born Killers in the same room…that is spotlessly clean. He shows up late to class and in a desperate move offers his previous night’s escapades as an idea for the class’s next project. Rinse, repeat until solved and you have another overly long Outer Limits episode.

Origin: Spirit of the Past – Origin is a fairly typical anime story with typical (but quality) animation.

Zhest – Producer Yusup Bakshiyev flew in from Russia to bring us this well-made action/horror movie tinged with psychedelia about a retired female crime reporter that specialized in sociopaths who comes out of retirement to interview a unique killer. Incredible production values are being exhibited in Russian film now and I expect great things from the trailer that ran before Zhest called Paragraf 78 — a paramilitary action/fu film — however Zhest had pacing problems in the middle and went completely off-kilter at the end. Fun, all-in-all, but not as easily consumed in the States as Night Watch was.

Faceless – this pointless short about a sculptor who finds a “unique” material for her human figure studies is unoriginal.

Starfish Hotel – a fanatic of a prolific mystery novelist is bored with his wife and life, and he has an affair that sends him on a surreal journey of man-sized rabbits, the disappearance of his wife, and prostitution. The story is slow and plodding, but the twists are interesting.

Rut=& – hilarious short about a man bored with the rut his life has become picks up a polaroid in his attic and starts a new hobby.

Simon Says – Director William Dear and son Oliver Dear were in attendance to screen what I believe is the one of the core films of this year’s festival. Crispin Glover plays twins, one of whom went on a killing spree but was released because of his retardation. They run an autoshop and roadside store near a camping site the teenagers go to for privacy…and you know where that’s headed. Glover is at his crazy finest with inspired clever slaying, the boys are hunky and the girls are hot and topless at least once. This film is a great addition to the tradition of fun teen slasher movies, funny at times, scary at times, silly at times.

If I Had A Hammer – another hilarious short. Thor is picking out a new hammer at the hardware store. This one was done with CGI.

Hatchet – another core entry for this year’s festival, Hatchet was screened with Driector/Writer Adam Green and Andrew Bryniarski (because it features his friend Kane Hodder, the stuntman for Texas Chainsaw 3 and Jason Goes to Hell) and this low budget teen slasher delivered a horror feast with no CGI. Hitting all the right notes, darkly funny and scary with over-the-top deaths, this film will surely cause studios to salivate at the prospect of a franchise. Special note: Mercedes McNab (Harmony from BtVS) is featured prominently…prominently topless, that is. Green says she’s actually smart and hardcore — nothing like Harmony or this character — and she decided that if she was going to do Playboy (out next month) she might as well do a topless stint in a horror flick.

The Fan and the Flower – voiced by Paul Giamatti, this precious short animation nearly brought a tear to Becky’s eye. It is wonderful.

Frank and Wendy – This almost stream-of-conciousness series of stories about two US super-secret agents has a lot of laugh-out-loud oddities but is generally insensible.

White Bunny& – this piece is very esoteric and intriguing…but it leaves a lot to question. One of those questions being: is there a point?

A Quiet Love – This beautiful quiet slow-paced love story seems to be misprogrammed for this festival, but we loved it. After his father dies a man in Germany meets a Danish woman and falls in love. She ends up with his passport back in Denmark and he is thwarted in multiple attempts to visit her across the border. Interwoven with a thread about dealing with parental death and the possibilities of fate, this is a wonderful film.

Severance – the first out-of-the-park smash in my festival experience, Severance features one of my favorite underrated actresses, Laura Harris (of “Fifteen”, The Faculty and “Dead Like Me”), and is the kind of thrill run fun that Fantastic Fest is all about. A group of military weapons design employees travel to a remote cabin for team building and find themselves facing the downside of their own company.

Apocalypto – another fully realized vision of Mel Gibson, we saw an early cut of Apocalypto. In this early cut things do drag occasionally, but generally this story of the capture of a jungle village Mayan being dragged into the city, and then his fated escape and chase is exciting. The general American public will mistakenly shun a movie that is subtitled, but the dialogue in the film is scarce enough to allay any fear of reading. (On a sidenote: one of the viewers drew parallels to a post-apocalyptic film that came out 25 years ago featuring a young Austrailian actor caught up in an extended chase.

Blood Trails – I have to believe that the writer/director of this film was cheated-on by his moutaing biking girlfriend and he wrote this to punish her. Unfortunately he just punishes the audience with poor performances from what seem to be good actors, while his suspense moments are just boring. The concept of a protaganist being stalked in the woods on mountain bike is promising, but it never delivers.

Day 2’s offerings were better even though the logistical limitations of the Drafthouse South began to show through. Several movies started late and were subjected to technical problems.

Snow Queen – short film about a how a girl copes by retreating into a cold emotionless fantasy world where she is the Snow Queen. There is promise in the talent behind this piece, but the film is short in emotional depth and short in it’s eventual payoff.

Inside – Jeff Mahler, the writer/director of Inside, is no stranger to the Austin movie fan scene and it felt right that his debut film would show here. Mahler will surely find it easy to find it easy to get funding for his next film, but Inside suffers from it’s limited funding and a subsequent shallow performance of the cast.

Microgravity – This was just confusing…but beautiful. It’s a short film about the trevails of a female cosmonaut, the sole inhabitant of an orbiting pod. The idea that lonliness really warps your time flow came through loud and clear.

Tideland – This movie delivered on all cylinders from it’s creator and is a complete failure. If I could make the best mud and twig pie with the flakiest crust, you still wouldn’t want to eat it. The sparse moments where the film drops into it’s fantasy realms shows Terri Gilliam’s real strengths, but the incredibly uncomfortable nature of the rest of it earns a new subtitle for the film: Harmony Korine’s Tideland (or maybe Todd Solondz’s Tideland).

Crooked Mick of The Speedwah – based on a children’s short story, this hyper-realistic blend of live action and animation has a glowing quality. If you have a chance, I highly recommend it.

Gamerz – last year one of the best festival films was a Scottish film with teenage actors and this year’s first great film could be described similarly. Instead of zombie dorks, these are dorks who play role-playing games. The mix of fantasy animation along with a slew of intepersonal relationship issues makes for a magnetic film. Also, be sure to check out
who did much of the music.

Midnight Movies – This review of the revolution of film programming that opened doors for out-of-the-mainstream filmmakers is actually kind of boring. I would only recommend it for the cinephile who is interested in seeing David Lynch, John Waters, Richard O’Brien and other key players in this revolution.

…or a leader who supports war with unreliable justification.

Philosophically speaking I see myself fulfilling an important role for my group of friends. I am the guy who sees enough movies to tell you what not to see. Don’t get me wrong, as a cinephile my first day of Fantastic Fest was great, but there were only three things I think any of you would have been excited about, and two of them only appeal to the straight males in the audience.

Oculus – as an independent short film, this <30 minute piece starts out really strong in it’s powerful visual simplicity and Scott Graham’s solid performance. Toward’s the end, though, both of those elements degenerate and the film becomes a run-of-the-mill Outer Limits episode — or maybe that show the kids are watching now-a-days on Showtime, Masters of Horror. The story concept, and the story line possibilities in this multi-chapter epic about a mirror that can do no right is pretty cool.

Haze – the actor/writer/director of this short feature film, Shinya Tsukamota, is known in Japnese-culture fanboy circles for his lead role in the cult film Tetsuo, the Iron Man. Just like the short that played before it, Haze is based on a great story idea and starts out strong, but unravels near the end. The film opens on a man waking up in a confined space with claustrophobic tunnels that lead to dead ends, spikes and razors and all manner of extreme discomfiting strangeness, and finally to a room full of diced people where he meets a woman who, like himself, has no idea how she got there. I hope not to spoil it for you, but the unsubtle metaphor should have hit you already…and you haven’t even seen the ending, yet.

Trailer Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny – this was the first high point of the evening for me, and I think everyone reading this is excited to finally see some clips from this eagerly anticipated celluloid quest.

Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning – if gore-or is your thing, ala Saw and Hostel, or you’re just dying to know how Leatherface came into being then TCM:TB is your movie. Otherwise, it was fairly unoriginal and formulaic. R Lee Ermey, Jordana Brewster, the dude who plays Leatherface and the producers and director were in attendance for a post-film Q&A that, _¡surprisingly_¡, drew very few questions. The highlight of the film (and the second exciting point of the evening) was Jordana’s low-cut jeans and butt cleavage, and the highlight of the Q&A is that the unrated DVD will be even gorier.

Full Moon Entertainment – Charles Band is the man behind Full Moon Entertaiment and Full Moon is the production house behind such classic schlock films as Puppet Master and Ghoulies. Band has a traveling show where he shows clips from his upcoming and past films (over 270 of them!); clips of now-famous actors who started in his films like Demi Moore, Helen Hunt and Viggo Mortensen; auctions some of his props to the fandom; guillotine’s a volunteer’s head; and directs a short scene with volunteers from the audience. The third and final highlight of the evening was Band convincing one of his “actresses” that what his scene really needed was for her to flash her boobs…which she did. I think Band’s point was: directors get actresses to do inappropriate things.

This Times article reports on new innovations coming to grocery stores near you. Among them are video screens in child car carts (which I will promptly reject if I ever see them – my child will use his imagination, dammit) and for the Hispanic customer … um … this:

a room where chickens can be slaughtered and sold the same day

Excellent. Only a matter of time before cows are herded into a “special room” at HEB.

After 4 trips to the used pet store in the past month, we finally found a dog. She doesn’t have a name, yet, so any ideas you offer will be considered with the levity they deserve. :-)

So, has anyone else checked out the new Outkast album? I’m kind of digging on it, but not nearly so much as I am the old Digital Underground I got off of Emusic.

But what i’m dying to hear is someone talking about the movie. Any good?